Broken RAM or ... ?

[Volw]

Turned on me PC today and noticed huge increase in loading times (in games mostly). Also framerate seems very jumpy. I havn't installed anything yesterday. So, what do you think it might be ?

[Nyana]

Could be anything, slow hdd, background processes, heat, ram, global warming, al qaida, the pope..

[Volw]

Well hdd is in fact old and slow (samsung 1604N - 7,200, ATA100) , backgrouds processes are perfectly fine.

[Nyana]

To check RAM:
http://hcidesign.com/memtest/download.html
http://www.memtest86.com/

[Volw]

It looks like RAM is ok, no errors. Any more ideas ?:)

[JojoTheSlayer]

All the fans are working? Extra heat could slow down prossesing in youre computer.. eg 3dcard, cpu etc.

If theres a "wear and tear", which would make it harder for the hdd to read the disk inside, access time can go up.

If you havent defraged youre computers hdd in a long time data gets scatterd around the hdd. This means it will take longer for the computer to get "that" peice of data you wanted. Eg one peice beeing at the start of the hdd, but the other beeing at the end. Ergo, it takes more time to get the data.
Use Diskdefragment to defrag youre hdd's.

You can also be using more space on the hdd than recommended to play games on. This since the more you use of a hdd mb the slower it gets. Use only 40% of the hdd total space you will see, eg, Planetside load much faster than if you use 80% of the hdd space...
Delete stuff and defrag to solw this issue :)

[Volw]

Fans are ok, temperature is normal. Memory temp is ok aswell.

As for defrag, I havn't done it for some time. Strange thing that the performance loss happened during one night tho.

Theres more than enough hard disk space.

So, I'm going to try defrag today ;)

[Volw]

Didn't even managed to defrag the hdd ... it refused to work ;)

Bought 200GB SATA Barracuda, used magic wand (don't ask ...) and recovered some stuff from the broken one.